Poplar. 701 Kennedy St., NW.
DC’s dining scene is increasingly dominated by big restaurant groups and out-of-town expansions. Poplar in Brightwood Park is the exact opposite. The neighborhood spot features just 24 seats and a small weekly changing menu utilizing local farms and foraged ingredients. Pretty much everything is cooked out of a Marra Forni pizza oven.
“I wanted a place up here that felt like you were going downtown without having to go downtown,” says Cerrissa Fitz, a hospitality industry veteran with a day job as an interior designer. She will oversee the entire dining room, down to bussing the tables. Her partner Sam Fitz, co-founder of Anxo Cider, manages the cider-centric bar. And chef/forager Iulian Fortu is the one-man kitchen.
“I hate to sound cliche and say farm-to-table, but we really are going to be farm-to-table,” says Cerrissa. Fortu operates a foraging business called Arcadia Venture that supplies local ingredients to some of DC’s top restaurants, including Oyster Oyster, Reverie, and Jont. Fortu will continue to forage ingredients for his own vegetable-centric menu, which will feature around half a dozen dishes plus Manifest Bakery’s sourdough with cultured butter that is house-made every week with local cream. (A hungry table of two could order the whole menu if they wanted.)
“I’m not going to do any sort of commercial commodity meats or fish. Everything’s going to be like transparent sourcing,” says Fortu, a former intern at Noma in Copenhagen who works as a private chef. The restaurant prides itself on low waste, and Fortu plans to save vegetable scraps to feed a friend’s pigs.
The name Poplar comes from Tulip Poplar trees, which are among the tallest in local forests and provide canopy for mushrooms—and morels in particular—to thrive. Appropriately, the opening menu is heavy on mushrooms, including a wild mushroom paella for two and a grilled lion’s mane mushroom “steak” that’s marinated in beet juice, red wine, and spices. There’s also a sweet-savory, mushroom-shaped panna cotta—part of which is infused with candy caps and the other part with chocolate and porcinis. It’s garnished with chocolate-porcini crumble “soil” and cherries preserved with a syrup made with spicebush berries Fortu foraged.
Other opening menu highlights include a sunchoke soup with lightly pickled Asian pear and crispy fried sunchokes. There’s also butterflied Virginia trout glazed with a fruity paw-paw barbecue sauce and served with smoked salsa verde and trout roe. Everything is roasted in the pizza oven that the owners inherited from a pizzeria that never opened in the space. (Fortu has a couple small induction burners too.)
The equally concise drink menu draws heavily from Anxo, which is known for dry, naturally fermented ciders produced just down the block. The owners also have a small importing company and will bring in additional ciders and wines. Still to come: cocktails on draft.
Cerrissa has added her interior designer’s touch to the corner space, combining the original coffered ceilings and brick with new marbled porcelain wall tiles and warm wood furniture (including a communal table). There’s also a framed photo of her grandfather, who came to the US from China and worked his way up in New York’s Chinatown restaurants.
“Since my grandfather spoke no English the only way I had to communicate with him was through food… He would carefully craft dishes while somehow finding a way to in broken English teach life lessons,” Cerrissa says. “This restaurant is a nod to him. I wish he could have lived to see me own a place of my own but I know he would be proud.”
Reservations for each week will go live on Tuesdays beginning February 11.
Jessica Sidman covers the people and trends behind D.C.’s food and drink scene. Before joining Washingtonian in July 2016, she was Food Editor and Young & Hungry columnist at Washington City Paper. She is a Colorado native and University of Pennsylvania grad.
